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A Knuckleball Fraternity of One

R. A. Dickey has an energetic mind, an expansive imagination. So, sure, he will not rule out a future in which more pitchers embrace his chosen weapon, the knuckleball, and give it equal billing alongside baseball’s 100-mile-per-hour fastballs and 12-to-6 curves.

He is open to the idea that his startling success for the Mets this season — a run that has grabbed much attention in New York and, increasingly, around the country — might inspire a new generation of knuckleballers and rescue the pitch from the game’s fringes, where it now resides as an oddity, a quirky skill of last resort.

Yet Dickey, 37, has also been around, a journeyman for far more years than he has been a star, and he knows quite well that what you would like to see happen often does not. Ultimately, he does not think much is going to change at all.

“Is it possible?” Dickey said of a theoretical knuckleball revolution. “Yes.

In Dickey’s view, and those of others who have made the game their livelihood, the knuckleball may look deceptively easy to throw — not that different, say, from tossing a whiffle ball in the backyard — but is actually incredibly difficult to master. In the end, very few pitchers want to commit to it, and hardly anyone succeeds in making it work.

Which at least for now leaves Dickey standing alone, a brotherhood of one among the more than 500 major league pitchers who have already appeared in a game this season.

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The Mets right-hander R. A. Dickey has forged an 11-1 record as the only knuckleballer in the major leagues.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

And the minor leagues are no different. Even in that vast population of players, only two pitchers are apparently trying to do what Dickey now does with such emphatic results.

So Dickey is the one and only practitioner, this season and perhaps in the ones to follow, of an idiosyncratic pitch that has a distinguished but limited lineage that includes Hoyt Wilhelm, Charlie Hough, Tim Wakefield and the Niekro brothers.

And Dickey, who is now pitching as impressively as any of them ever did. Those who are increasingly curious about how he is able to do what he is doing, overwhelming hitters with a pitch that flits and flutters to the plate like a butterfly on a leash, can get a quick tutorial on Sunday night, when he takes on the Yankees in a nationally televised interleague matchup.

Those who tune in will see Dickey clasp his fingers into a claw and dig his fingernails into the baseball before he releases it toward home plate. They will watch the ball proceed with little or no spin, but with all sorts of unpredictable movement stemming from the aerodynamic friction of the ball’s seams.

And if Dickey is as remarkably effective as he has been lately — two straight one-hitters, a soaring strikeout total, an 11-1 record — they will see any number of Yankees batters look befuddled.

But even if Dickey does stand out on Sunday night, even if the clamor he has created gets a little louder and continues that way through the rest of the season, veteran baseball people do not expect anything to change. They just don’t envision the knuckleball entering the mainstream.

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In R.A. Dickey's view, the knuckleball may look deceptively easy to throw, but it is actually incredibly difficult to master.Credit
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

“I can’t see that happening,” said Buck Showalter, who has managed in the major leagues for most of the last two decades and now presides over the Baltimore Orioles. “And there’s about 100 reasons why.”

One big reason, he said, is all the extreme, learned nuance that goes into throwing the knuckleball and controlling it, despite its everyman vibe.

Paul DePodesta, who leads the Mets’ department of amateur scouting and player development, compared baseball to golf, saying both sports often require refined skill rather than raw athleticism. To him, the knuckleball represents the epitome of this idea. “How many young, amateur golfers have flop shots like Phil Mickelson?” DePodesta said. “The knuckleball takes that level of skill, almost to the point of being unique.”

Phil Niekro, one of the rare knuckleballers who began his career with the pitch, riding his success to the Hall of Fame, said baseball’s talent evaluators were uninterested in finding atypical talent, which means there is little incentive for someone in high school to mimic Dickey.

“Scouts aren’t out there looking for knuckleball pitchers,” Niekro said. “They’re looking for guys who can throw hard.”

Jerry Dipoto, the general manager of the Los Angeles Angels, said that the quality of a knuckleball would be next to impossible to judge if a scout actually did encounter a knuckleballer in an amateur game, creating one more disincentive to learn the pitch.

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Steve Sparks won 59 games with a knuckler.Credit
Jeff Zelevansky/Associated Press

“Sometimes you get R. A. Dickey,” he said, “sometimes you’re just going to get a Sunday softball guy who likes to throw a knuckleball.”

Young players might be uninterested, anyway. When it is not dancing, the knuckleball can resemble a batting practice pitch, and several people in baseball said stubbornness and egos probably kept teenagers from enduring the inevitable thrashings they would have to go through to have any chance at becoming effective with the pitch.

The consensus was that older players, facing failure, would always be the best candidates to try the pitch. They are the ones most likely to possess the equilibrium to let the pitch do what it may, and then deal with the consequences.

“One of the things that can make a knuckleballer a good one is if they have gone to it out of desperation,” Dickey said. “There are all kinds of nuances you can really only learn by having been beaten up a little bit and picking yourself back up.”

He could have been speaking about himself, and he probably was. Drafted by the Texas Rangers in the opening round of baseball’s 1996 amateur draft, Dickey switched to knuckleballs after a decade of minor league cities and major league ineffectiveness.

“Everything was big league about him except his arm,” said Showalter, who managed the Rangers while Dickey was reinventing himself. Yet it was clear to Showalter that Dickey had a knuckleballer’s disposition: “There’s a lot of things that go into it, and R. A. had all of them. He reeked of a guy who could do it.”

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Mark Lemke tried to ride the knuckleball to the majors but failed.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Which he has. He was a revelation for the Mets in 2010, joining the rotation in the second half of May and going 11-9, the first time he had sustained success with the knuckleball. Last year, his knuckleball was just as good, but lack of run support left him with an 8-13 record.

This year, his knuckleball is even better, the speeds changing, the pitch finding the strike zone more and more. Known for being inquisitive and literate; admired for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro this past off-season and raising money for charity as part of the adventure; admired, too, for a recently released, and painfully honest, memoir, Dickey now is all that as well as the pitcher who is tied for the lowest earned run average (2.00) in baseball and who has the third-highest strikeout total (103).

Doesn’t anyone want to join him?

One person who thought about the knuckleball, probably even before Dickey did, was Mark Lemke, who won a World Series ring as a second baseman for the Atlanta Braves in 1995 and then tried to reinvent himself as a knuckleballer in his mid-30s.

He latched on with an independent league team and good-naturedly endured a couple of seasons of hammerings before surrendering. “I wasn’t trying to get into the Hall of Fame, just into that small fraternity of knuckleballers,” said Lemke, now a Braves broadcaster. “But they don’t send me their memos.”

Lance Niekro, son of Joe, nephew of Phil, tried the same thing Lemke did, transforming himself from a major league first baseman into an apprentice knuckleballer. He flopped, just as Lemke did.

But they were 100-1 long shots. And those who might have a more realistic chance of learning the pitch do not seem interested.

“You want guys to do well, to prove to people it’s not just a fluke,” said Steve Sparks, who made his debut as a knuckleballer in the mid-1990s and went on to win 59 games in a nine-year career.

But with a knuckleball boom nowhere in sight, Dickey is left to do the proving all by himself.

Correction: July 3, 2012

An article on June 24 about whether the success of the Mets’ R. A. Dickey would inspire other pitchers to try the knuckleball described incorrectly one of his achievements at the time. Dickey had thrown two straight one-hitters, not two straight shutouts. (An unearned run scored in one of the games.)

Tyler Kepner contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2012, on page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Knuckleball Fraternity of One. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe